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Personal PLM: Pros and Cons

Three years ago, I published the article – Do We Need Personal PLM? In a nutshell, the idea I was discussing was about aggregation and re-purposing data coming from multiple sources using SOA (yes, it was a quite popular buzzword back in 2009) and other technologies. Earlier today, I stumbled by Arena Solutions blog – Cloud PLM gets personal. Navigate your browser here and have a read. The article is relatively short. It speaks about new tool Arena Solutions just released to the market – PartList. I was blogging about that some time ago – Arena PartList and your BOM in the cloud. The conclusion I’ve made back then was that PartList is probably cool stuff. However, to understand how does it fit together with other processes, and data can be an interesting study to make

So, Personal PLM. Why I’d be interested to do so? I think, personal is very appealing to current industry and computing trends. We are using more personal devices at work. It is an even trend called BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to work. In addition to that, web and social networking create a virtual environment that personal in many aspects. Thinking about the same – personal PLM can sounds like a cool stuff to do. I want to have a personal tool to get a job done. I kinda like it. And, as I mentioned before, PartList is probably a great and cool tool. One of my favorite features is BOM saver. The ability to capture BOM from multiple places is incredible important. Here is my favorite passage about that:

PartsList comes with PartSaver—a bookmarklet that you can use to capture and save critical part information with one click. If you’re browsing parts online, you can use the PartSaver browser button to capture critical component information—including datasheets and vendor information, and make comparative evaluation easy.

However, why I’m not interested in personal PLM? My primarily reason is “collaboration”. The biggest problem is that everything that happens in the company, and outside is social. People need to communicate to get a job done. Without doing these things, the performance will be going down. Another aspect is related to the integration of data. I have my “Part List” and you have your “Part List”. How does it work together? Arena blog post doesn’t mention that. It is not clear how to share BOM between different PartLists.

What is my conclusion? I love the notion of a “personal” when it comes to so-called DIY (do it yourself). From that standpoint PartLists seems to be a great tool. I can be responsible for how to organize and create my stuff. At the same time, in my view, Arena is missing point of integrating PartLists coming from users. Maybe it is a part of fully-fledged-versions? I don’t know. What I can say is that provide the ability to people to working together remains a priority for PLM in many companies these days. Just my thoughts…